Science Questions

We can successfully insulate against heat, and against light, and against sound. Is it possible, do you think, that we may one day be able to insulate against the force of gravity? And is anybody working on it? John in Colchester

The force of gravity is a different think to heat, light and sound. Heat, light and sound are vibrations of various different types. Sound is a physical vibration in the air, or in an object. Heat is another physical vibration, a very much faster one. And light is a vibration in space itself. So in order to insulate against them you've just got to get something to sort of dampen their vibrations. Gravity is a force. So it's actually something which pulls something. You can insulate against forces such as electromagnetism, because they've got positive and negative. And so if you want to, you can rearrange positives and negatives in order to insulate against it. But because you've only got one kind of gravity, you've only got positive gravity, you can't have the negative ones there which you'd need to insulate against it. So you can't, unfortunately, insulate against gravity. Though it might be very useful if you wanted to build a space ship or something. However, people do talk about anti-gravity though. I'm just wondering if you could really create anti-gravity maybe you could counteract gravity. So maybe that will be possible in the future.

December 2006